A conversation with Timothy Brennan

ABSTRACT

This interview was conducted in 2022 as part of a series of wide-ranging conversations via email with the prominent American public intellectual and activist Timothy Brennan, whose literary and cultural criticism, secular humanism, and critique of cosmopolitanism have from the late 1980s onwards influenced perceptions of postcolonial studies and “World Literature”. Preoccupied with the intellectual and philosophical praxis, dynamics, malignity, and drawbacks of metropolitan cosmopolitanism, “World Literature”, and world system, Brennan here grapples robustly and critically with the literary and intellectual history of Marxism, Hegel, modernity, and ecocriticism. He also explores digital literature; Ibn Khaldun’s secular affiliations; Edward Said’s places of mind; modernity; and world system in the US empire, the UK, India, Asia, and elsewhere. He maps out an original and thought-provoking analysis of antinomian and anti-colonial genealogy of cultural studies, modernity, pedagogy, secular humanism, and the role of the intellectual in academia and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• World Literature
• postcolonial studies
• cosmopolitanism
• secular humanism
• world system
• neo-liberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tayseer Abu Odeh

Tayseer Abu Odeh is an author and activist, and assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Criticsm at Al- Ahliyya Amman University of Jordan. In 2021, he guest-edited and translated a special poetry folio on Gaza in Peripheries: A Journal of Word and Image (Harvard University). He serves currently as an advisory editor for Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies (Edinburgh University). His forthcoming creative work “The Gardens of Narration” will appear in Michigan Quarterly Review in 2023. His essays have appeared in Middle Eastern Literatures, Categories of Religion, Al-Jazeera, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World. He was a visiting scholar at the Global Leadership Institute of the University of California, San Diego in 2009.